Life and Death in Palestine: Information gift for a Premier — Day 15

Below is my information gift for you on this, Day 15, of my intended 19-day project to fill in some possible gaps in your knowledge base with respect to life and death in the Israeli Occupied Territories.

Introduction to today’s information gift –

Look, first at this photo. It captures the agonizing specter of death on the faces of the relatives of their grandmother, Zaina al-Amour, 54, who was killed on her family’s farm by an Israeli airstrike.

According to an account in The Electronic Intifada, in recent days, Israel has launched a series of aggressive military actions in the besieged Gaza Strip, killing a Palestinian woman and injuring several other people, including three children. And like clockwork, mainstream Western media swooped in to throw the narrative in Israel’s favor, ignoring Israel’s relentless violations of the Gaza ceasefire and its killings of dozens of civilians in the besieged territory. As is almost always the case, the Israeli military initiated the latest round of violence with ground incursions into Gaza as part of a supposed mission to destroy cross-border tunnels. This is the same pretext Israel used to justify its ferocious military assault on Gaza in the summer of 2014.

Reposted below is an abridged version of the article. Alternatively, click on the following linked title to read the full story, including pro-Israeli spin from The Guardian, New York Times, and Associated Press.

In recent days, Israel has launched a series of aggressive military actions in the besieged Gaza Strip, killing a Palestinian woman and injuring several other people, including three children.

And like clockwork, mainstream Western media swooped in to throw the narrative in Israel’s favor, brushing aside Israel’s relentless violations of the Gaza ceasefire and its killings of dozens of civilians in the besieged territory.

But first, the facts.

Israel started it

As is almost always the case, the Israeli military initiated the latest round of violence with ground incursions into Gaza as part of a supposed mission to destroy cross-border tunnels.

This is the same pretext Israel used to justify its ferocious military assault on Gaza in the summer of 2014, which killed 2,251 Palestinians, including 1,462 civilians, 551 of them children.

The independent inquiry commissioned by the UN Human Rights Council into the 2014 assault found that Hamas “tunnels were only used to conduct attacks directed at IDF [Israeli army] positions in Israel in the vicinity of the Green Line [the Israel-Gaza boundary], which are legitimate military targets.”

Despite this, Israel continued to whip up fears – often aided by pliant outlets such as The New York Times – about Palestinian “terror tunnels” leading into kindergartens, as a way to justify Israel’s cruelty towards Gaza.

The Israeli army claims to have located such a tunnel in recent days based on information it says it extracted from a captured member of Hamas.

It is also possible that Israel is using this as an opportunity to test out anti-tunnel technology it has been developing with a $120 million grant from the US administration of President Barack Obama.

Hamas insists the tunnel Israel discovered is old and predates the 2014 war.

The Israeli army said that Hamas fired “more than five mortar rounds at forces during operational activities adjacent to the security fence with the Gaza Strip.”

According to the Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas, since 3 May, Israeli forces had made incursions into two separate areas near the Gaza boundary to a distance of up to 300 meters into the territory.

It called the incursions – which Israel’s military spokesperson acknowledged – a “clear violation of the ceasefire agreement in 2014 and a new aggression on the Gaza Strip.”

Palestinians have every reason to be concerned about Israel trying to expand its self-declared “buffer zone” inside the boundary with Gaza. This is an area extending hundreds of meters into Gaza where Israel has killed and injured dozens of Palestinians in recent years who were simply trying to grow essential food supplies on their farmland.

Qassam said Israel should “stop invoking reasons to justify its violations, and should leave the Gaza Strip immediately.”

But instead Israel escalated the situation by pounding Gaza with at least 29 artillery shells and 11 air strikes since Wednesday, according to a tally by the group Euro-Mid Monitor for Human Rights.

END OF ABRIDGED REPOST — To read the original article, click on the above linked title…